ABOUT This small tool is used to seach/download some LaTeX packages that were listed in CTAN: http://ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/ or search/download any files in http://ctan.org/tex-archive/. Since version 1.0.1 the tool uses the cache file http://kyanh.net/ctan.tools//cache.tbz This file contains the list of all files in CTAN. It's updated daily by a cron job hosted by http://kyanh.net/. The size of file is about 400k. The tool requires wget, lynx, gawk, wc, tar/bzip and sed program to run correctly. Some linux distributions donot contain lynx by default and you must install lynx manually before running this script. So this tool requires a *nix-liked environment to work. texer tested and reported that the tool worked fine in Cygwin environment. This tool was written by kyanh kyanh is a member of Vietnamese TeX Users Group . VERSION 1.0.0 2008/05/11: first version 1.1.0 2008/05/15: search files (use cache file) 1.1.1 2008/05/15: fix bug (ctan_update) 1.2.0 2008/05/16: smaller cache. Thanks to Karl Berry 1.3.0 2008/05/23: everything is cached. Faster. New options. Thanks to texer at VietTUG 1.3.1 2008/05/24: fix typo. lzma support USAGE ctan about : show all information about this tool ctan usage : show usage ctan version : show script version ctan update : update using http://kyanh.net/ctan.tools//cache.tbz (450k) ctan update --direct : update directly from CTAN. You are going to download 15MB ctan grep : search packages match . grep ability is supported ctan get : download packages match to working directory If you want to search files: ctan fgrep : search files. ctan fget : download files match to working directory ctan grep -file ctan get -file EXAMPLES ctan grep theorem # search packages match 'theorem' ctan grep ^n # search packages srated by 'n' ctan get ^n # download packages started by 'n' ctan get -file contrib/ntheorem.zip ctan fget contrib/ntheorem.zip The result by '-file' option should be filtered ctan fgrep ntheorem | grep zip TODO * package information supported * ability to select FTP mirror * search by package description,... * package build script THANKS * Karl Berry * Nguyen Van Hanh LICENSE This tool is published under LPPL. BUGS Please report to kyanh .